(YellowTimes.org) -- Belatedly,
in a September 29, 2003 article in the New York Times by Douglas Jehl, the Defense Intelligence
Agency has awkwardly admitted that most of the intelligence and information
offered by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) for the past several years, which
was provided by Iraqi defectors of questionable credibility, was of little to
no value, all at a cost of $150 billion, more than 300 dead American soldiers,
and at least 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians.

A prominent and callous epithet
of such defectors mentioned in the above article is KhidhirHamza, the self-claimed Iraqi atomic "Bomb
Maker." Given a short lived assignment in the Iraqi nuclear program in
1987 to lead the atomic bomb design team, he was kicked out a few months later
for petty theft. Reduced to a non-entity in the accelerated nuclear weapons
program between 1987 and the start of the 1991 war, he retired from the Iraqi
Atomic Energy Commission in 1989 and became a college lecturer, a stock market
swindler and a shady business middle-man.

Upon his escape from Iraq
in 1994, leaving his family behind, he was shunned asylum by the Iraqi
opposition groups themselves, the CIA and the British intelligence agencies
that were supporting these groups.

Seeking refuge as a lecturer in Libya, he still managed, through the INC, to
initiate his usefulness to them by the publication of a series of three
articles in the British Sunday Times in 1995 claiming through fake documents
supplied by "authoritative sources" that Iraq was currently making atomic
bombs. The Sunday Times passed them on to the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) for its valuation, but decided not to report the IAEA's findings that the documents were "not
authentic." The Sunday Times has not yet acknowledged using forgeries in
their stories about Iraq's
supposed nuclear weapons.

Panicking after his son's arrival
to Libya in order to appeal
with him to return to Iraq
to protect his family, he once again knocked on the doors of the IAEA, the INC
and the CIA, but to no avail.

Only when HussainKamel, the man in charge of all weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) work and research in Iraq since the late eighties, had
escaped to Jordan in August 1995 and informed the IAEA about his efforts to
hide the scientific reports on WMD research in his chicken farm, did the CIA
feel that Hamza would be useful to them and then
nestled him to their bosom.

Once settled, Hamza
went into hyperspin, giving interviews, writing a
book, appearing on TV talk shows and speaking before congressional committees
forwarding the premise that Iraq
had rejuvenated its nuclear weapons program and was within just a few years
from a few atomic bombs.

He kept up his barrage, in a CNN
interview, until the last week before the occupation of Iraq. He was then sent by the
Pentagon to Iraq
behind American tanks to "counsel" on the country's nuclear industry,
with a very lucrative salary.

He is at present aiding the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) in the handling of Iraqi nuclear scientists and
engineers. Several of them have been interned for having come forward with
their meager information while others are being
refused their passports to leave Iraq.

Strangely, none of the American
media that fell over themselves in the past few years by hosting Hamza for his hyperbolic lies about Iraq's potential nuclear arsenal
have now considered approaching him during the past six months to follow up on
his claims of a rejuvenated nuclear weapons program. He was most certainly
useless to David Kay's fruitless investigations.

Lest the American media have lost
their sense of accountability, others have not.

[Imad
Khadduri has a MSc in Physics from the University
of Michigan (United States) and a PhD in Nuclear Reactor
Technology from the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom). Khadduri worked
with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 until 1998. He was able to
leave Iraq
in late 1998 with his family. He now teaches and works as a network
administrator in Toronto, Canada.]